9 months of blogging

I have now been blogging for 9 months and sometimes I feel a little discouraged. When I read posts of bloggers who claim they could give up their day job to work full time on their blog after several months of blogging, I feel I must be doing something wrong.

Yet, I really like blogging. First, I like writing and I like sharing ideas with other people. Then, I like feeling part of a blogging community, even if I can’t claim many readers. I even like the time looking for new ideas for blog posts.

My results since June 2018

I launched my blog in June 2018. Before, I read several blogs about blogging and I could pick up some ideas. It helped to have some advice to rely too. However, in the first months, my traffic was extremely low and I felt as if I was only writing for myself.Here are my monthly results since June.

• June: 5 views
• July: 20 views
• August: 92 views
• September: 112 views
• October: 131 views
• November: 202 views
• December: 273 views
• January: 321 views
• February: 359 views

As you can see. the number of views is still low but is regularly increasing. I do not include the figures for March because the month is not over yet but the number of views keeps increasing.

Most of my traffic comes from Pinterest. However, here too, the results have been somehow disappointing. Whereas I had managed to increased the numbers of Pinterest viewers to 50.000 between June and December, the number decreased in January and February to reach 15.000. I managed to reach 19.000 in March. To be honest, I am still a little shocked by the extent of the decrease. I think that there might have been some changes in Pinterest’s algorithms. This seems to happen fairly often. My number of followers has been regularly increasing though. I think I will read 1000 followers in March.

To diversify my traffic sources, I also joined Bloglovin. I find it interesting to find new blogs but until now, I did not notice much traffic coming from this site.

Moreover, I began recently to use WordPress not only to manage my blog but also to discover other blogs and connect with other bloggers. I like using the WordPress interface to comment on other blogs because this is so easy and you don’t have to fill up any information. I do not have much traffic coming from WordPress yet but the number of my followers has been increasing fast.

Things to improve

There are many things I should improve to make the blog work better. Here is a short list.

First, I would like to improve my Pinterest strategy. I already read some blog posts on the subject but as Pinterest is changing its algorithms regularly, this can be a little confusing. For instance, I first read that group boards could help you to increase traffic but then I found other articles claiming that Pinterest’a algorithms had changed and that group boards did not work any more.

Second, I would like to finally work on my emails list. I have been planning to do that for a long time. Although I created an email list, I have spent much time developing it since.

I would like to keep reading and commenting other blogs too. It is difficult to find much time to do this, but it is fun.

I would like to work on blog design too. My blog right now looks ok but I would like to make it prettier.Finally, I am thinking of using an other medium to publish my posts. Indeed, Bloglovin has not been working so well for me until now (maybe I just need to be patient) but I am not sure what else I should choose. If you have a blog too, I would be glad to hear about your experience with this.

 If you are interested in my blogging journey, you can check the two following posts:

• What I learned in three months of blogging
• 10 reasons why you should start a blog